The deployment of high quality imaging to medical devices, smart phones, tablet computers, and other information devices with screens has grown tremendously in recent years. The wide variety of information devices supporting image processing and image understanding requires the ability to process multiple types of images with varying degrees of available information.
Medical imaging devices can provide diagnostic images based on different types of sensor information. Some medical imaging systems can display raw or dynamic imaging and video information in real time. Such systems can process image information of varying quality, resolution, and orientation, but still require a high degree of medical expertise to be interpreted properly to help reach an accurate diagnosis of a medical condition.
Other imaging systems can use ultrasound, x-ray, visible light, infrared, sound navigation and ranging (sonar), magnetic resonance imaging, positron emission tomography, or a combination thereof to generate static and dynamic images. Some systems require a priori information about the classes of images being analyzed. Other systems may require manual identification of initial control points to perform segmentation.
Thus, a need still remains for an image processing system that can create good quality images that are easier to interpret. Such images must be provided across a wide range of devices having different sizes, resolutions, memory capacity, compute power, and image quality. In view of the increasing demand for providing diagnostic medical imaging on the growing spectrum of intelligent imaging devices, it is increasingly critical that answers be found to these problems. In view of the ever-increasing commercial competitive pressures, along with growing consumer expectations and the diminishing opportunities for meaningful product differentiation in the marketplace, it is critical that answers be found for these problems. Additionally, the need to save costs, improve efficiencies and performance, and meet competitive pressures, adds an even greater urgency to the critical necessity for finding answers to these problems.
Solutions to these problems have long been sought but prior developments have not taught or suggested any solutions and, thus, solutions to these problems have long eluded those skilled in the art.